Elon Musk Shares Video Of Tesla Robot Optimus Folding A Shirt

Elon Musk Shares Video Of Tesla Robot Optimus Folding A Shirt

Tesla Optimus robot can fold a shirt!

Elon Musk’s Optimus humanoid robot from Tesla is doing more stuff — this time folding a t-shirt on a table in a development facility.

The robot looks to be fairly competent when it comes to this task, but moments after Musk shared the video, he also shared some follow-up information which definitely dampens some of the enthusiasm for the robot’s domestic feat.

Optimus folds a shirt pic.twitter.com/3F5o3jVLq1

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) January 15, 2024

Not to knock the difficulty in creating a humanoid machine that can manipulate soft materials like clothing in a manner approximating human interaction with said objects; that’s some might fine animatronics work.

But suggesting that this puts them anywhere near the realm where Optimus will be operating as a fully-functional domestic servant with all the capabilities of a human domestic worker it might replace would be like showing a video of a wooden marionette and adding ‘of course, this will be a real boy soon.’

Musk is famous for claiming that things are going to happen in a time frame that makes absolutely no sense, but his prediction of ‘within three to five years’ made at the bot prototype’s original unveiling last year (not counting the year before when it was just a guy in a suit) is laughable given its current state, and the current state of the art for robotics in general.